In Value We Trust: What We Believe At Valueships
It’s late 2017, two unknown professionals from the product and the consulting worlds look for a place to express their philosophy on SaaS/D2C business. Unable to find the right platform, they found Valueships, which grew from a small idea blog to an actual company.
It’s still a sprout, but it became visible enough to go live. By the end of 2019, I decided to leave the previous company, secure the 12M funding through two angel investors, and move full-time to bring it further to the world.
As we’re creating the Firm now, we want to send one aggregated message to the world. Here is what we believe in and how our philosophy works.
We believe that every business, especially SaaS/D2C, needs to do three things to succeed: Create, Divide, and Capture Value.
What is the Value, then? According to Google definitions:
“the regard that something is held to deserve; the importance, worth, or usefulness of something.”
“consider (someone or something) to be important or beneficial; have a high opinion of.”
“estimate the monetary worth of.”
In other words, Value is both the utility of your product, but also how much someone is willing-to-pay for it. These two things lead to the amount of wealth you accumulate, which naturally is a derivative of your company’s profitability.
A) Created by your product and offering;
B) Divided with a price and transactions;
C) Captured and secured with the right business capabilities.
These are our main principles and the first part of our name. We believe in “Value.”
As 2021 stars, we’re moving towards an interim/post-pandemic world, depending on the vaccine distribution development. We don’t know what the future holds, but we know what the past had.
Whenever a crisis hits, we see that average profitability drops — considering that this is the most essential value driver for the companies (check the reports of FAANG companies).
Data sources for 2020 are still limited, but we know one thing: the turbulence we see now is closer to wartime, rather than previous financial crises, e.g., sub-prime or dotcom. In 2020, substantial parts of the global economy shut down due to covid-19. Like during The Great War or II World War, specific production means literally evaporated. The new estimates show a -4.5% global GDP YOY dropdown (source). If we think of the last sub-prime crisis, the pandemic effect is not even comparable. The last time, the global GDP trajectory slowed down from 3.8% to 1.3% (source) but almost never reached negative levels.
We believe that creating a healthy business becomes more important than ever. We know we can help with doing that.
Another factor associated with the Value in tech companies is, unsurprisingly, growth. Every year, KeyBank Capital publishes its SaaS survey results (source). If the forecast results didn’t change that much, in 2020, less than one-tenth of the companies ensured the P+G>40% ratio.
We believe that SaaS companies need to combine profitability with a healthy growth trajectory. Otherwise, they float in a “gray area,” never moving close to these companies, which lead the market.
How we do it? We have a strong understanding of what drives business results for SaaS companies. We combine the knowledge of our 20+ ex-MBB consultants, software product experts, and marketing & sales specialists to drive meaningful results in three areas: Monetization, Acquisition, and Retention.
While Monetization drives the highest impact on Profitability, Acquisition and Retention are critical for Growth. While the capabilities mentioned above drive operational performance, they can’t operate within a vacuum. That’s why we have come up with the idea of enablers.
Those are internal organization & processing capabilities, alongside data and analytics, which connects the company internally and externally, e.g., with their clients.
That’s what we call a “Flywheel.” Within this framework, we can map pretty much any SaaS/D2C company’s strategy and operations.
Whenever we start working with a Client, we deploy our diagnostics toolkit to identify gaps and opportunities. Only afterward, we move further as we don’t want to commit to something we can’t achieve.
We believe that our approach is one of the few ways to drive meaningful profitability and growth.
If we take the most critical things from the above, we can aggregate them as our Values. These are the things we believe, the things we declare to ourselves, and most importantly, our Clients.
P.S. While we’re fully staffed right now, reach out to maciej@valueships.com. We can take more work under our roof next month.
